I have to stop you right there. ECHELON has been gathering SIGINT for Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States since the 1960's: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON so the SIGINT existed. Add to that Kenneth Williams July 2001 "Phoenix Memo", which was buried by the FBI until Coleen Rowley took advantage of a whistle-blowing law to bring it to light: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Memo

There was also a Chinese wall between intelligence agencies, the FBI, and the DIA, which was de jure in one direction, but de facto in both directions due to interagency pissing contests about the information flow only going one way, with no tit-for-tat http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Able_Danger#The_wall

Because they were so incredibly effective at preventing 9/11 in the US, and so effective at stopping the London, UK subway bombings, and so effective at preventing the train bombing in Madrid, Spain, right? I'm feeling less imperiled already.

Perhaps if instead of complaining about information disclosures, they disclosed the plots they had been able to foil, and had rather public trials, we'd trust them more, but at this point, they act more like a police agency. Police agencies catch bad guys after the fact, after you are already dead from being blown up or shot or stabbed or raped. You know, after the crime.

I'd prefer not to live in a police state: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_state since their track record at preventing criminal activity from occurring in the first place is generally piss-poor.

There were Credit Card Skimmers installed in the checkout lines in 21 Bay Area Lucky Stores, followed by rampant buying sprees on the card of the people stupid enough to use the self-checkout lines, which are not very well policed. I definitely won't use the things.

http://millbrae.patch.com/groups/editors-picks/p/credit-card-skimming-reported-in-21-bay-area-lucky-stores

Frankly there are, and have been for years, UPC code databases, but you have to license them, unless you are willing to go for the vastly more incomplete consumer assembled EAN/UCC-13 code sites. My first experience with a licensed UPC database was in 1995, but I was aware of NCR systems where you could get them in 1985 or so. They used to come on QIC-20 tapes for loading into the NCR Tower XP and Tower 32 systems that they used to use to run all the cash registers in the supermarket. Now you can get them on DVD.

There are also food ingredient databases, but they tend to be more sketchy, particularly for store brands, which generally come off the assembly line that's currently cheapest. There is also a push for cost reduction on store brands, so they will tend to initially go with a higher end supplier when they bring out a new store brand something, and several moths after it's out, you'll read the label and find they've substituted corn syrup for the cane sugar and similar cost reduction tricks.

It's a real bitch if you have, for example, a corn allergy, or Crohn's disease, and they've bait-and switched things on you. You also have to watch the fried foods, such as prepackaged dinners, when they decide to use peanut oil instead of some other more expensive oil, because it was cheapest on the commodity food oil market for the plant that week.

They don't data mine this stuff from your frequency marketing card because there would be some legal liability both from a HIPPA information standpoint, and if they changed a formulation, and hadn't updated their database recently enough to flag an allergen at the checkout.

We'll just implant an RFID chip. 665 was just implanted, and you're in luck! No waiting in this line!

"On April 7, 1977, President Jimmy Carter announced that the United States would defer indefinitely the reprocessing of spent nuclear reactor fuel. He stated that after extensive examination of the issues, he had reached the conclusion that this action was necessary to reduce the serious threat of nuclear weapons proliferation, and that by setting this example, the U. S. would encourage other nations to follow its lead."

Technically, this policy was push by the environmental lobby:

"Environmental groups saw the breeder as a danger. An unlimited source of energy, they feared, would mean more energy use and waste, leading to more global environmental degradation and also opening new risks for proliferation of nuclear weapons."

See the whole story here: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/readings/rossin.html

We more or less knew he had them because he used them at Halabja, and as recently as 1991:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_and_weapons_of_mass_destruction#Chemical_weapon_attacks

See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frans_van_Anraat

The "Free" market can't. Have you stopped to consider there's a reason the Gov't did it? Maybe because no other force is strong enough to stand up to a group of 20,000 people that collectively own the everything, while the other 6 billion wallow in abject poverty?

And it worked great. Tons of economic growth in the past. I think the phrase is "Nordic Socialism". Most people, including yourself, confuse it with Soviet Era fascism and/or Chinese Kleptocracy.

Payback, that is, for all the hurricanes they send us every year. Suck on it, Africa.

I'm outta mod points anyway so I'll just clear up this lie right here. It was _not_ a 90% tax rate. It was a graduating rate where you paid the same tax on the first $50k as someone making only $50k, then you paid the same tax on the _next_ $50k as someone making $100k, and so on so forth. When you got to $1 mil/yr+ you paid 90% on the amount between $900k and $1 mil. I'm simplifying it so my numbers might be off, but that's the gist of it.

Basically at one point in time we said there ought to be limits on how much of societies limited resources we dedicate to 1 person.

Can you give an example of a civilization that collapsed for these reasons, rather than some combination of ecological catastrophe, foreign invasion and/or plague? Because I can't think of any.

Rome. The western empire didn't collapse because it was invaded; it was invaded because it had already rotted out from the inside.

It's called PRISM because that's what you use to split optical fibres.

No, you don't. It's probably called PRISM because of that image, but you actually tap optical fibers by bending them until a little light leaks out. Unless you're the NSA, in which case the backbone providers happily install splitters (also not prisms) for you.

Prisms separate light by frequency, which isn't what you're trying to do. Although the code name could refer to separating the information from the data stream (breaking the while light into colors) rather than being a reference to the collection method.

You not giving instructions on how to access the contents of the hard drive can be argued as contempt since you are preventing investigators from executing their court sanctioned search for evidence.

They can access the contents through the standard drive interface. Figuring out what the contents MEAN is up to them. For instance, Al Capone's ledgers were in code. It would have made a mockery of the Fifth Amendment if they could demand Capone decrypt them to be used in his prosecution. (so instead they tortured the decryption out of one of his underlings, but that's another story)

Depending on the level of compression a full HD (1080p) stream requires between 400KBytes/sec and ~2 MBytes/sec of bandwidth. That is, approximately 4MBits-20MBits.

Needless to say, even 100MBit ethernet has no problem with a couple of those, let alone existing 1-gigabit ethernets.

At 2160p (which is what people call 4K, for 3840x2160), perhaps ~1 MByte/sec to ~5 MBytes/sec depending on the level of compression and the complexity of the video. That is, somewhere north of 50 MBits on the top end. Despite having four times the pixels you don't actually need four times the bandwidth for a high quality stream. Standard Gigabit ethernet is still plenty good enough for a dozen and a half 4K streams.

-Matt